Bisync: A bilingual editor for synchronized monolingual texts

Abstract

In our globalized world, a growing number of situations arise where people are required to communicate in one or several foreign languages. In the case of written communication, users with a good command of a foreign language may find assistance from computeraided translation (CAT) technologies. These technologies often allow users to access external resources, such as dictionaries, terminologies or bilingual concordancers, thereby interrupting and considerably hindering the writing process. In addition, CAT systems assume that the source sentence is fixed and also restrict the possible changes on the target side. In order to make the writing process smoother, we present BiSync, a bilingual writing assistant that allows users to freely compose text in two languages, while maintaining the two monolingual texts synchronized. We also include additional functionalities, such as the display of alternative prefix translations and paraphrases, which are intended to facilitate the authoring of texts. We detail the model architecture used for synchronization and evaluate the resulting tool, showing that high accuracy can be attained with limited computational resources. The interface and models are publicly available at https://github.com/ jmcrego/BiSync and a demonstration video can be watched on YouTube.